Under the standard approach to counterfactuals, to determine the meaning of a counterfactual sentence, we consider the “closest” possible world(s) where the antecedent is true, and evaluate the consequent. Building on the standard approach, some researchers have found that the set of worlds to be considered is dependent on context; it evolves with the discourse. Others have focused on how to define the “distance” between possible worlds, using ideas from causal modeling. This paper integrates the two ideas. We present a semantics for counterfactuals that uses a distance measure based on causal laws, that can also change over time. We show how our semantics can be implemented in the Haskell programming language.

In this paper, I will describe a system that was developed for the task of Visual Question Answering. The system uses the rich type universe of Type Theory with Records (TTR) to model both the utterances about the image, the image itself and classifications made related to the two. At its most basic, the decision of whether any given predicate can be assigned to an object in the image is delegated to a CNN. Consequently, images can be judged as evidence for propositions. The end result is a model whose application of perceptual classifiers to a given image is guided by the accompanying utterance.

The challenge of automatically describing images and videos has stimulated much research in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. In order to test the semantic abilities of new algorithms, we need reliable and objective ways of measuring progress. We show that standard evaluation measures do not take into account the semantic richness of a description, and give the impression that sparse machine descriptions outperform rich human descriptions. We introduce and test a new measure of semantic ability based on relative lexical diversity. We show how our measure can work alongside existing measures to achieve state of the art correlation with human judgement of quality. We also introduce a new dataset: Rich-Sparse Descriptions, which provides 2K human and machine descriptions to stimulate interest into the semantic evaluation of machine descriptions.

We present and discuss a couple of approaches, including different types of projections, and some examples, discussing the use of fuzzy sets for modeling meaning of certain types of language constructs. We are mostly focusing on words other than adjectives and linguistic hedges as these categories are the most studied from before. We discuss logical and linguistic interpretations of membership functions. We argue that using fuzzy sets for modeling meaning of words and other natural language constructs, along with situations described with natural language is interesting both from purely linguistic perspective, and also as a knowledge representation for problems of computational linguistics and natural language processing.

In this paper we present new results on applying topological data analysis to discourse structures. We show that topological information, extracted from the relationships between sentences can be used in inference, namely it can be applied to the very difficult legal entailment given in the COLIEE 2018 data set. Previous results of Doshi and Zadrozny (2018) and Gholizadeh et al. (2018) show that topological features are useful for classification. The applications of computational topology to entailment are novel in our view provide a new set of tools for discourse semantics: computational topology can perhaps provide a bridge between the brittleness of logic and the regression of neural networks. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using topological information, and some open problems such as explainability of the classifier decisions.

The early phases of requirements engineering (RE) deal with a vast amount of software requirements (i.e., requirements that define characteristics of software systems), which are typically expressed in natural language. Analysing such unstructured requirements, usually obtained from users’ inputs, is considered a challenging task due to the inherent ambiguity and inconsistency of natural language. To support such a task, methods based on natural language processing (NLP) can be employed. One of the more recent advances in NLP is the use of word embeddings for capturing contextual information, which can then be applied in word analogy tasks. In this paper, we describe a new resource, i.e., embedding-based representations of semantic frames in FrameNet, which was developed to support the detection of relations between software requirements. Our embeddings, which encapsulate contextual information at the semantic frame level, were trained on a large corpus of requirements (i.e., a collection of more than three million mobile application reviews). The similarity between these frame embeddings is then used as a basis for detecting semantic relatedness between software requirements. Compared with existing resources underpinned by word-level embeddings alone, and frame embeddings built upon pre-trained vectors, our proposed frame embeddings obtained better performance against judgements of an RE expert. These encouraging results demonstrate the strong potential of the resource in supporting RE analysis tasks (e.g., traceability), which we plan to investigate as part of our future work.

This paper investigates data-driven segmentation using Re-Pair or Byte Pair Encoding-techniques. In contrast to previous work which has primarily been focused on subword units for machine translation, we are interested in the general properties of such segments above the word level. We call these segments r-grams, and discuss their properties and the effect they have on the token frequency distribution. The proposed approach is evaluated by demonstrating its viability in embedding techniques, both in monolingual and multilingual test settings. We also provide a number of qualitative examples of the proposed methodology, demonstrating its viability as a language-invariant segmentation procedure.